Washington Gov. Jay Inslee Wants to be POTUS

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee announced on Friday he will be running for the Democratic nomination for president in 2020. While the field he enters is shaping up to be a crowded one, he is the first sitting governor to declare for the blue team.

While Inslee, 68, was elected governor in 2012, he doesn’t have much name recognition outside his home state. He now faces the difficult task in breaking through in a field of Democrats that already includes six U.S. senators, two current and former members of Congress and a former cabinet secretary.

But the Seattle native, who’s held elected office since 1989, is betting the growing threat of climate change will be a top-of-mind issue for Democratic voters.

“This is a moment. This is the 11th hour to defeat climate change. It is a moment of great urgency, but it is also this incredible opportunity to seize for job creation,” Inslee said in an interview with ABC News last week at the National Governor’s Association Winter Meeting in Washington, D.C.

“Mother Nature is making it break through, not me. Because Mother Nature, aggravated by climate change and carbon pollution, has burned down Paradise, California, drowned Houston, and is now drowning Miami Beach,” Inslee added. “This wake-up call is being delivered, and people are responding to it.”

Inslee will officially kick off his campaign with an event Friday afternoon in Seattle at a solar energy company, touting his work as governor growing his state’s clean energy industry.

The governor also will appear on ABC News’ “This Week with George Stephanopolous,” on Sunday, and will make his first trip to Iowa as a candidate on Tuesday, followed by campaign trips to Nevada and California later this month.

The potential problem for the Governor, besides his low name recognition outside the Pacific Northwest, is that while climate change is a growing issue that is very important to many, it isn’t to the general electorate, and only 6th most important among Democrats, the voters whose nomination he is seeking.

From what I can tell, Jay Inslee is about raising the importance of climate change in the American psyche. This chart from Pew shows it is not an top priority for most Americans and even among Dems it still ranks 6th. pic.twitter.com/1JGO2lvDYX

Whether he is running to win, just to raise awareness of the climate change issue, or to grow his own profile, it remains to be seen if Jay Inslee can make inroads to Democratic primary voters in a very crowded 2020 field.

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Born and raised in West Virginia, Andrew has since lived and traveled around the world several times over. Though frequently writing about politics out of a sense of duty and love of country, most of the time he would prefer discussions on history, culture, occasionally nerding on aviation, and his amateur foodie tendencies. He can usually be found misspelling/misusing words on Twitter @four4thefire.

As a Washingtonian I’m a big Jay Inslee fan, but I don’t think he’s running for President; nobody outside of Washington has even heard of him, as far as I can tell (hell, I’m a politics nerd and I don’t think *I* could tell you who the governors of more than maybe ten states are off the top of my head). As Jaybird said, he’s running for running mate, or perhaps a cabinet position or similar high-level job in a future Democratic administration; his term will be up next year and while technically there’s no term limit for the office, it’s a standing Washington gubernatorial tradition not to run for a third term, or at least it has been for the last 40-odd years. So he’s looking to keep his political career going, and he’s smart enough to realize he’s never going to get the nomination, so if he drops out once a frontrunner emerges and backs them, he can draft off of their wake into his next job.Report

It's funny how browsers I think are a thing (specifically Vivaldi and Brave) don't even register on this list. Goes to show my techie bubble.

Browsers used to have better names. Netscape was brilliant. What the heck is a Firefox? (It's "Firebird" with IP considerations is what it is.) Chrome? Edge? Edge? Come on.

It's amazing how quickly Chrome accomplished what Firefox never did. It just goes to show the power of corporate muscle. When Google announced they were creating a browser I thought it was kind of dumb. I was wrong.

People say Firefox is better than Chrome now but I just can't get into the groove of it. Chrome doesn't work right on one of my computers and I use Firefox on it. it's passable, but I wish Chrome worked on it.

With Internet Explorer being replaced by Edge and Edge being Chrome-based, that means may be looking at 3 of the top 5 and 85% of desktop browsing occurring through Chromium browsers. That's concerning.

The ship's presence, he speculated, might have been related to the testing of a nuclear-powered cruise missile.

Did Trump tweet anything about this, you ask?

The United States is learning much from the failed missile explosion in Russia. We have similar, though more advanced, technology. The Russian “Skyfall” explosion has people worried about the air around the facility, and far beyond. Not good!

As some of you know, I lost my father two weeks ago. My mother called me that Friday afternoon and said, in not such direct words, that “you better try to get up here if you can.”

I did, but I was too late. But in the aftermath of it, it was good to be there. My mother and I ate together for two weeks (my brother and his family are coming in later, such are the vagaries of scheduling bereavement leave in a government agency). We cooked some favorite things. My mom roasted a chicken and then laughed ruefully and said “I guess it’ll be harder to use a whole one up now” and the day after that, we made a favorite chicken enchilada recipe given us by a former minister of her church who had lived in the Southwest. And she baked a favorite cake of ours (my father was diabetic and we had to be careful about sweets in the house, and also baking was hard while he was so unwell). I think it helped, maybe?

There’s a German word, Kummerspeck, which literally means “Grief-bacon” and is used to refer to the weight you put on while grieving. I had scoffed at that before because the more minor griefs (eg., breakups) I had suffered made me NOT want to eat…..but I know I’ve put on a couple pounds in the last two weeks and will have to explain to my doctor when I go in for my checkup on Tuesday….

And people brought in food – lasagna, and bread, and other things.

And we went out to eat lunch a couple times; before my father’s health failed so much going out to restaurants was a favorite thing and my mom hadn’t been able to do it, really, for six months or more while he was needing her care.

When I spoke to her today after I got home, she noted that even though she had told the ‘church ladies’ who do bereavement lunches she didn’t want them to go to the trouble for the memorial service this fall (we have some people with some specific dietary concerns coming), someone did call her back and suggest a dessert-and-coffee reception before the service and I urged her to have them do that – I have fixed things many times for funeral lunches at my own church and it feels very much like it’s one kindness I can do for the family, and having a piece of cake or a few cookies may make small talk easier in a time when it’s going to be hard.

I admit I always rolled my eyes over the “how to relate to your weird dumb relative who isn’t like you” pieces, or, worse, the “you should refuse to spend time with them or try to harangue them into your viewpoint over the Thanksgiving table” pieces, because my family has a lot of….different…..people in it, and we’ve always managed. You talk about other stuff, that’s all. You talk about how a favorite team is doing or the funny things someone’s kids are doing or you share memories….

Jeffrey Epstein, the millionaire financier and accused sex trafficker, is dead by suicide, according to three officials familiar with the matter.

The officials told NBC News he was found at 7:30 a.m. ET at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York and that he hanged himself.

Epstein accuser claims she was ordered to have sex with prominent men

He was transported Saturday morning from the Metropolitan Correctional Center to a hospital in Lower Manhattan. Upon arrival, he was in cardiac arrest, people familiar with the matter say.

Epstein, 66, was being held on federal sex trafficking charges.

He was arrested July 6 in Teterboro, New Jersey, as he returned from Paris on a private jet.

He had pleaded not guilty and was denied bail.

The indictment on his case showed that he sought out minors, some as young as 14, from at least 2002 through 2005 and paying them hundreds of dollars in cash for sex at either his Manhattan townhouse or his estate in Palm Beach, Florida, federal prosecutors revealed last month.

Epstein was charged with one count of sex trafficking conspiracy and one count of sex trafficking. He faced up to 45 years in prison if found guilty.